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The world is a business… or at least that´s what they think!

Governments are not serving us or our countries…they are serving the corporations. They are owned by them. They pay the world leaders election campaigns and they dictate the rules. This is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It has been written about since the late 70´s…

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) delivering his "mad as hell" speech

Network, an American satirical film released in 1976 about a fictional television network has a Mad as Hell moment that continues to receive recognition, decades after its initial release.

¨I dont know what to do about the depression and the inflation, the russians and the crime in the streets. All I know is that first You´ve got to get mad, You´ve got to say I am a human being God Damn it!, My life has value!¨ Excerpt from movie clip.

It even goes deep into the Monetary system and its overall control..¨You are an old man who thinks in terms of Nations and People, there are no Nations, there are no people, there is only one Holistic system of the systems…It is the International System of Currency who determines the totality of life on this Planet¨…¨…There is no America, There is no Democracy, there is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Union Carbide, Dow and Exxon. Those are the Nations of the world today…” Excerpt from movie clip.

Five centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano was one of my college books I had to read and write an essay of. The book was written in 1971. Galeano analyzes the history of Latin America as a whole from the time period of the European discovery of the New World to contemporary Latin America, arguing against European and later US economic exploitation and political dominance over the region. Basically milking the place dry and moving on to next country.

In the past decade, these ideas have been more openly shared and discussed through documentaries like Zaitgeist, The Corporation, The End Game, etc.

The people behind this documentaries are American people who had a crisis of consciousness or a deep awakening and joined the age of transparency that we are living. They are not communists anymore, it is not Marx Engels or cuban Fidel Castro or the¨antichrist¨ as so many right-winged, tea-party followers americans call Hugo Chavez (Venezuela´s President). Even within Hollywood circles their own Oliver Stone made the very controversial movie South of the Border (2009), a documentary about Hugo Chavez which took a lot of criticism for obvious reasons that I will not go on about here. On a post production interview, Oliver Stone says:

¨I think Hugo Chávez is an extremely dynamic and charismatic figure. He’s open and warmhearted and big, and a fascinating character. But when I go back to the States I keep hearing these horror stories about ‘dictator,’ ‘bad guy,’ ‘menace to American society.’ I think the project started as something about the American media demonizing Latin leaders. ¨Oliver Stone

It is people from within the well stablished system that have openly spoken: On December 2009, Mike Prysner, an US war veteran made shocking speech that hit 1,897,856 views on YouTube in 7 days! ..“Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it’s profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us”– were his famous words. On April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. WikiLeaks biggest leak of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs came from a source deep within the army and the most secret american government agencies like the CIA and the NSA.

John Perkins and his books ¨Confessions of an Economic Hit Man¨ and ¨Secret History of the American Empire¨ tells a first hand story. He was an Economic Hit Man that worked for the US government and for corporations. John Perkins says he helped the US cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. He has just come out with his second book on this issue.

¨… since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly….¨

¨…We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all…¨, ¨…the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.” John Perkins

From Colectivo Hua.ra.che

Of course United States is not the only one to make accountable for economic world domination, economic Hitmen work from within other powerful countries like France, Italy, Germany whose interests are in Africa or the middle east as well. On a less raw and rough way of exposing this truth, French writer and Director of the very acclaimed movie Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet in his recent work Micmacs (2009) shows how two big corporations that make and sell weapons control the war on Afghanistan and economically support militar coups in Africa. His work is highly creative and imaginative, almost fairy-tale like and yet he touches very important issues that affect the lives of thousands of people. The making of war and their casualties.

So, why do I care about all these Truths exposed, shared, posted and re-posted over and over through the years? because we grew up with thousand of lies repeated over and over in the Television, on the magazines, Newspapers, school books and mainstream propaganda. We need to acknowledge them, understand them and get rid of them. Is the only way to create a new way of living and the so hoped and wished for… New World, New Earth, New Society.

This is my invitation today. As my favorite German Philosopher once said:

Al truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

2 thoughts on “The world is a business… or at least that´s what they think!”

Miriam, thank you for this amazing magazine with a warrior spirit. I am felling very proud of you. Your mexican spirit is very present on it. But at the same time the spirit of New Zeland is modeling you in a beautiful way, too.